


Girl Meets Creativity Epilogue

by disturbtheuniverse



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22850986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disturbtheuniverse/pseuds/disturbtheuniverse
Summary: what if lucas acknowledged that he and riley were more like siblings than boyfriend/girlfriend and the triangle never really happened?
Relationships: Lucas Friar/Maya Hart
Kudos: 114





	Girl Meets Creativity Epilogue

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this after girl meets creativity came out so yes it's been 100000 years! but i still think this is what should have happened.

She was keeping a secret from her best friend.

Everything felt utterly Twilight Zone-esque recently. Riley and Lucas weren’t the perfect couple anymore, unofficially or not, at least not in the eyes of her peers. Now it was…it was…Ugh, Maya couldn’t even _think_ it. The yearbook fiasco had been entirely out of her hands, but she couldn’t shake the accompanying guilt. Especially since her brief escapade as Riley had revealed something to her, something important, something she still didn’t know how to tell Riley.

Bottomline, Lucas and Riley could never work out romantically. Maya was just as blindsided as anyone, but it made sense, now that she’d thought about it. Lucas _wasn’t_ Riley, but he was a lot like her. There was still an air of mystery about him, though. Suddenly Maya was dying to know how he talked about her to Zay. He was the only one who really knew the other side of Lucas, the side Maya had only caught glimpses of.

Maybe that was another thing. Could Riley handle Lucas’s angry outbursts, rare as they were? No, they would only scare her. But Maya…she could cope with that, couldn’t she? She wasn’t calling Riley weak – Riley wasn’t weak, in fact, she was the strongest person Maya knew. How she managed to smile through every bad thing that came their way and cheer Maya up no matter how much Riley herself may have been struggling was mind-blowing. Maya could never do that. The Lucas thing was different. Because Riley couldn’t stand the idea of Lucas being someone other than advertised. But Maya had her own dark side and knew that Lucas’s didn’t make him a different person. It was something he was getting under control, and she could relate to that.

Then there was Josh, who she _really_ liked, but he had made it abundantly clear that their age difference was too much of a hurdle for him. And she didn’t blame him. She didn’t push in any serious way, even if she liked to pretend that she would never give up. In her mind, she wasn’t a girl in middle school and he wasn’t practically in college. When she did try to see it from his point of view, it didn’t look good, she understood that. They couldn’t work, not now. But was falling for the guy her best friend liked any better?

It would be easy to fall for Lucas from the notion alone that they would be a cute couple, but that wasn’t it. The problem was that Lucas was so easy to fall for, period. He had his own problems to work through, but he made her better, just like Riley. That’s why they couldn’t work together – Lucas and Riley were two fixers with nothing to fix. Maya was broken and she needed all the help she could get.

She was in detention alone today, the only excuse she could think of to avoid seeing her friends. Every time they were together these days, it seemed like Lucas and Maya were shoved together somehow. Not physically, at least, but gosh, that had to be next, didn’t it?

No, it was more…Zay saying that Lucas had called her beautiful, people mistaking them for a couple, them having all of these weird _moments_. There had been a lot of looking without speaking recently, and Maya still wasn’t sure how she felt about that, even if these occurrences had led to many a visit to the bay window with Riley. Maya really believed that Lucas wanted her to be happy and was somehow surprised to find that she wanted the same for him. But could she make him happy? Maybe this whole thing was just selfish on her part.

Maya was absent mindedly scribbling in her sketch pad, her mind more occupied on other matters, when suddenly two more people walked into detention.

“I never said that. Not in those words.”

“Zay…I think we need to have another talk about not talking to certain people a certain way.”

For a stupid moment, Maya considered hiding her face behind her sketch pad, but even that wouldn’t do much to convince anyone that she wasn’t, well…her. Instead, Maya furrowed her brows at Zay and Lucas.

Zay was the first to speak, of course, though Lucas was looking at Maya, too. “Well hello, Miss Hart. Funny seeing you here.”

“Yeah. Real funny.”

He sat down at the desk to her left, and instead of sitting next to his best buddy from back home, Lucas sat to Maya’s right. Cool. This was exactly the type of thing Maya had been trying to avoid, but this was even worse, because she didn’t have the buffer of Riley and Farkle. All she had was Lucas with his meaningful looks and Zay who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.

Zay immediately raised himself up in his desk to peer over at Maya’s sketchpad. “What’cha drawing?”

Maya snapped it shut and stared at the door, willing Mr. Matthews to appear. “Nothing.”

For the first time in her whole life, someone powerful up there seemed to smile down upon her as Mr. Matthews walked into the room with some papers to grade while watching over detention. He walked all the way to the desk and sat down before looking up at today’s detention participants. After a moment, all he said was, “I’m not surprised.”

Good for him, because she was still in shock. At least about the Lucas of it all. Zay was a bit like her, always ready with something to say or someone to piss off. And Lucas…well, she didn’t need to hear the specifics to know why he must have landed here. He was always willing to put himself on the line for Zay.

“Nice to see you, too, sir,” Zay replied with a wide grin. Sometimes Maya forgot that Zay also had that air of southern hospitality about him.

Mr. Matthews glanced down at his coffee thermos and back up at the three of them, all looking at him expectantly. “I’m going to need more coffee for this.”

He promptly stood up and left the room while Maya cursed whoever had blessed her with his presence only to take him away from her so quickly.

The moment he was out of the room, Zay turned back to her. “So what’d you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Detention?”

Maya scowled at him before staring at the board in front of the classroom. “None of your business.”

“Ooh,” Zay laughed before addressing Lucas. “She’s mad at us.”

“No, she’s not,” Lucas assured him, speaking for the first time since first entering the room. Maya resolutely kept her eyes focused in front of her.

“Oh, so she’s just mad at _me_?”

“I didn’t say that. But you’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?”

Maya sighed loudly before turning to Zay. “Saying things you shouldn’t say to people.”

She still didn’t allow herself to look at Lucas but she could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke. “Yeah. That thing.”

Zay put a hand to his heart, giving her him best apologetic look. “Well, I do apologize. Hold on a sec, I have something to do.”

Without further explanation, Zay nearly sprinted from the room, and a moment later Maya could faintly make out him and Mr. Matthews having some sort of argument.

“You should probably go after him,” Maya suggested, barely giving Lucas a sideways glance.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’d help.”

Maya wasn’t dumb, and by now she hoped everyone knew as much. But in this case, being not dumb meant that she and Lucas both knew what Zay was up to. He wasn’t very subtle about how much he tried to push Maya and Lucas together. If she didn’t know any better, she’d almost think he had orchestrated this entire detention thing on purpose.

“Maya—”

“We’re not supposed to talk in detention.”

“Maya.”

She groaned before finally turning her head to face him. “What?”

“I feel like we should probably talk.”

Maya grabbed her sketchpad again and reopened it, shading in the house she had been drawing before. She was fixated on drawing everyday things as they looked at sunset recently, thanks to all the time she spent watching the world around her when her friends were busy with better things like quality family time. Maya’s relationship with her mother had definitely improved as of late, but that didn’t mean she suddenly had time to dedicate to being with her daughter. Maya was just getting better at understanding why.

“What about?” She asked as disinterestedly as she could manage.

“I know you don’t want to hurt Riley.”

Her hand stopped moving for a moment before she recovered and returned to her drawing. “Of course not. And I never would.”

“Neither would I. She’s my friend, too, Maya.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t want to just be your friend, Huckleberry.”

Maya could feel his eyes on her and it infuriated her somehow that he could always _do that_. Just face these things head-on while she was so determined to ignore whatever they had between them.

“That was a year ago. Things are different now. Besides, Charlie—”

Now she put her pencil down, shaking her head furiously. “I know you like him, but that doesn’t mean Riley can forget all about you just because there’s another guy in the picture.”

“Don’t you like him?”

“I do, but he’s not some kind of scapegoat, Lucas.”

He knew she was serious now and it was almost enough for her not to mentally beat herself up for using his name. It was something she found herself doing more and more often, but she still wasn’t used to it. She didn’t _want_ to get used to it, because it would be admitting that the nature of their relationship was changing.

Lucas opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off by Mr. Matthews pushing Zay through the classroom door. “You’re never this curious _during_ class, Mr. Babineaux.”

“That’s because _during_ class, there’s always something more interesting going on.”

Zay returned to his seat with a sigh, clearly wishing he’d been able to distract their teacher for longer.

Mr. Matthews returned to his desk, eyeing the three of them suspiciously. Maya, for her part, was relieved about his return and went back to her sketch pad. Lucas’s eyes lingered on her for a moment before he pulled out a book to pass the rest of detention.

“Oh, sure, just ignore me,” Zay commented, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. “I’ll just take a nap.”

The next couple of hours passed by in almost painful slow motion, but somehow detention came to an end without Maya spontaneously bursting into flames or something similar. Naturally, Zay was the first one out of the room. Mr. Matthews waited for Maya and Lucas to leave the room before trailing after them and offering to walk them to the train station.

“We’re good, sir,” Lucas answered before Maya could. “I’ll walk Maya to the nearest station.”

Mr. Matthews nodded and wished them both a good night, sneaking in a warning to Maya to behave herself so he wouldn’t have to see her in detention again.

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” she assured him absent-mindedly, too preoccupied on how she was about to be alone with Lucas again.

Once they were outside, Maya tightened her grip on her sketchpad and stubbornly walked to her train as quickly as she could. She knew Lucas wouldn’t physically try to stop her, but he was also a head taller than her and much faster. Stupid long legs, stupid baseball star…

“Maya, stop being silly.”

She grit her teeth together and kept walking at her current pace. “I’m not being silly, I just want to go home.” It was almost funny how much she _didn’t_ want to go home. She would be alone in a cold apartment with nobody to keep her company, not even a TV. But it had to be better than this.

Lucas jogged up to her, easily keeping up with her now that they were side by side. “Is this about Riley?”

“Of course it’s about Riley, genius.”

“You think she would be mad at you for doing something that makes you happy?”

She laughed unconvincingly. “You think you make me happy? That’s a bit presumptuous of you.”

“Do you always use big words when you’re nervous?”

“I…am _not_ nervous.”

“Do you always lie badly when you’re nervous?”

She reluctantly slowed her pace but didn’t dare stop moving. The train meant safety, the train meant escape and an end to this interaction. The train meant they could go their separate ways until class the next day, where things would be back to normal. “What do you want me to say?”

He countered her question with one of his own. “What do you think will happen if we just ignore this?”

“There _is_ no this.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.” Lucas kept his eyes on Maya as they turned a corner, just two more blocks away from the nearest 5 train line.

“I’m not sorry for not being thrilled about how things have been lately.” She was purposely being vague, but she knew Lucas would see straight through that.

“ _Everything_ is changing, haven’t you noticed?”

If her confusion was any indication, apparently she hadn’t. “Meaning what, Ranger Rick? What big, huge, life-altering thing have I missed here?”

“Riley isn’t nervous around me anymore because we’re good friends now. But that’s all we are. She…she’s like my sis—”

“Don’t say it.” Maya felt guilty all over again for not telling Riley about her latest revelation. But at least now she knew Lucas was doing the same thing.

“Even if we don’t say it, it’s still there.”

For a moment, Maya wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the way he felt about Riley or the way he felt about her.

He got on the train with her. She should have expected as much, but didn’t he have a family to get home to? Wouldn’t his parents actually worry if he stayed out too late?

“This reminds me of something,” she commented.

“Yeah?”

Usually she would be much kinder, or at the very least hide how afraid she was by bantering with him rather than arguing. But by this point, all walls were gone. He knew she had passively accepted that there was something between them, no matter how unwilling she was to act on her feelings. “Your first date with Riley was on a train.”

Maya glanced over at him if only to raise an eyebrow in his direction, but Lucas ducked his head with a barely concealed smile on his face.

“I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“Then you underestimate me.”

The train stopped and Lucas stood up. “I would never.”

He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek before she could even consider ducking away. “This is my stop. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Maya couldn’t think of anything to say, least of all some kind of witty comeback. By the time he had left the train and it was moving once again, she still didn’t know what to say.

All she could do was put a hand to her cheek and wonder what she was supposed to do now.


End file.
